Nowness: Dan Pearson - Great Gardens

From a small valley in Somerset he has called home since 2010, British landscape designer, horticulturalist, gardener and writer Dan Pearson OBE has turned his intuitive planting approach to establishing a vast garden on an undulating private plot. Set on a soft incline behind Hillside, the home he shares with his partner and studio co-director Huw Morgan, the garden began as a former smallholding used to raise beef cattle, from which Pearson took on the project of managing the land to increase its native flora, transforming heavily grazed pasture into biodiverse meadows.

Cultivating the space in conversation with the landscape, Pearson considers the ornamental garden an evolving site for experimentation, connected by snaking pathways, designing a painterly planting scheme entirely at home in its rural setting, against what he describes as the “borrowed view” of land that lies beyond.